Discussing Life - Hoping to Address a few Concerns

[willng3]

In simplest terms: What does need?

At the current moment I would say Creature Protection or possibly a more resilient creature.

Reason being, Life currently has a number of essentially dead cards because it doesn't have the capability to prevent its creatures from being removed before it can put them to good use.  If you want Life to be more versatile then I would suggest making these dead cards playable which would in turn enable Life to branch out further than simply being a Rush-or-Die Element.

So if you grant Life Creature Protection, suddenly Mitosis and Empathic Bond become more playable.  Rustler can become more commonly used.  Thorn Carapace becomes a card to be feared by many.
A resilient creature would allow Mitosis and Empathic Bond to become more playable and depending on what the creature itself can do opens up new doors of possibilities.

I honestly think that these issues are more important to focus on first rather than PC or CC alone simply because that still means that a number of strategies are still nearly useless; even though Life is currently crafted to act as a pure rush element, its card pool and theme suggests that it needs to do much, much more than this.

[Glitch]

At it's core, life is frequently unfairly treated.  I've seen the argument: If life is about living, why should it have any killing mechanisms?  And that argument is partially true, it shouldn't have some fear-inspiring global death mechanic.  (Extinction: deal 3 damage to all creatures, survivors have their ability replaced by mitosis)

But by that same coin, Death is about killing, why is it allowed to have creatures?

I understand the argument that there should be punishment for trying to harm life's creatures, but if we're drawing on the real world, there are none.  If you find a pond and smash a frog, nothing bad will happen to you.  The other frogs in the pond won't attack.  The same holds true for every creature in currently in the element of life, actually.

Some sort of pride based mechanic would be cool.  For instance:  Bear.  If a creature would die, all other bears get buffed.  This won't work for 2 reasons:
1.  It is unreasonable that you would get out multiple bears before the enemy kills it.
2.  It is unreasonable that an enemy would kill your bear once you have multiple out.

If your bear is strong enough to survive CC (which currently requires 4-6 HP), than it's too slow to rush.  And as life has no draw power, it is unlikely to get more than 2 bears out before the game is over.

At it's core, the card is flawed because it relies on your opponent's mistake, not your own good play.

So how DOES life survive in the real world.

Life creatures don't protect each other.  If a creature lights on fire, that's it, bye.  If wolves attack a tribe of buffalo, the buffalo all run together, and the slow sick buffalo gets eaten.  Yes, a mother will attack you if you threaten it's cubs, but I listed earlier why this method wouldn't be smart. Life /does/ survive because it generates more creatures that can be killed.



And you say, "that's what mitosis is".  I won't take credit for designing mitosis.  I did come up with bunnies, which ran off of a similar mechanic.  The card was underpowered and it's probably a good idea it wasn't added, but there's a reason I made mitosis a creature's ability and not a spell.  If you put mitosis on a creature, and every time you activated the ability you got another creature with mitosis, there would be durability and creature protection.  More creatures than can be controlled.  Right now, playing mitosis on a creature is basically condemning it.

Here's an example of a durable CC resistant life card.

Evolution Beast  5 life
1|1, 1|3 upgraded.
This creature has the passive: Mutant.

3 entropy:  Create a copy of this evolution beast.  It will randomly get between -2/-1 and +3/+3.  You can activate this ability multiple times per turn, and on the first turn the card is played.

[darkrobe]

Id like to mention the card i came up with yesturday looking at this post.

Zebra | Elite Zebra (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,33581.0.html)

the idea is to have a creature that benefits from other creatures in terms of being CC resistant.

let me know what you think and whether it is life appropriate.

[Jangoo]

Ever heard of the proverbial saying "Life sucks and then you die" ?

-> Life is supposed to suck. You are supposed to lose. No improvement intended ...

[EmeraldTiger]

Would something like Mtg's Hex Proof work for ?

[Rutarete]

Would something like Mtg's Hex Proof work for ?

Example: http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,33562.0.html

[jmdt]

Would something like Mtg's Hex Proof work for ?

Would be great.  I love hexproof

needs a bunch honestly, especially to be truely PvP competative.  I agree with Willy that allowing mitosis and rustler to do their thing without splashing would really beneficial to .  When whatever strategy you have dies to 1 CC card, it makes fielding competative decks very difficult.

[Naesala]

Here's a small idea, life has more vanilla creatures than most elements (which makes sense because they are more animals than magical creatures) Why not give life some kind of Luciferen? A spell to give them all a passive ability. Besides that, Life is about having a lot of creatures. As such, more needs to be done to allow it to spam creatures. Perhaps a spell that consumes all life quanta to give all creatures mitosis, or to simply create a copy of every life creature on the field? Just some ideas.

[jmdt]

Would something like Mtg's Hex Proof work for ?

Example: http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,33562.0.html

That is essentially cloak.  A 4-6 turn can't attack creatures permanent would really be the ticket for 's proliferation strategies.  If it made you creatures invulnerable it would be best.  Something that also protects from Rof and pande.

[jmdt]

Here's a small idea, life has more vanilla creatures than most elements (which makes sense because they are more animals than magical creatures) Why not give life some kind of Luciferen? A spell to give them all a passive ability. Besides that, Life is about having a lot of creatures. As such, more needs to be done to allow it to spam creatures. Perhaps a spell that consumes all life quanta to give all creatures mitosis, or to simply create a copy of every life creature on the field? Just some ideas.

I like the copy of every creature idea, but even at 15 cost, it would be OP in a hurry.  Its basically an uber version of sky attack.  Although, the best target is dragons, and dragons are bestbuffed up with sky attack as it would be cheaper.  An idea to think about.

[Rutarete]

Would something like Mtg's Hex Proof work for ?

Example: http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,33562.0.html

That is essentially cloak.  A 4-6 turn can't attack creatures permanent would really be the ticket for 's proliferation strategies.  If it made you creatures invulnerable it would be best.  Something that also protects from Rof and pande.

It's a temporary form of Hexproof for . And it does protect from RoF and Pande. Chaining it would be the Hexproof you're looking for, would it not?

[willng3]

I understand the argument that there should be punishment for trying to harm life's creatures, but if we're drawing on the real world, there are none.  If you find a pond and smash a frog, nothing bad will happen to you.  The other frogs in the pond won't attack.  The same holds true for every creature in currently in the element of life, actually.

There are none if you're applying this example to Life's creatures based on if they were real creatures.  But the problem is that they're not real creatures, they're creatures in a fantasy card game.  Based on that factor alone, there's really no way for you to say how each creature can or can't behave because there's nothing defined to indicate how exactly they're supposed to behave.  Case in point:  Dragons do not exist in the real world therefore I can assume that they must behave in ways similar to various stories discussing them.  Problem is that some stories indicate that Dragons are solitary creatures while others indicate that they're extremely defensive of each other and actually do feel the emotions I listed earlier when one of their own is killed.  Also, I'm very interested to know exactly what Empathic Bond does if Life doesn't possess any kind of unification between its creatures to begin with.

Some sort of pride based mechanic would be cool.  For instance:  Bear.  If a creature would die, all other bears get buffed.  This won't work for 2 reasons:
1.  It is unreasonable that you would get out multiple bears before the enemy kills it.
2.  It is unreasonable that an enemy would kill your bear once you have multiple out.

If your bear is strong enough to survive CC (which currently requires 4-6 HP), than it's too slow to rush.  And as life has no draw power, it is unlikely to get more than 2 bears out before the game is over.

At it's core, the card is flawed because it relies on your opponent's mistake, not your own good play.

I'm not exactly sure why being too slow to rush is a bad thing.  Look at Life's card pool.  Do the cards provided mean that rushing is the only thing Life is supposed to do?  Not at all.  I'm going to assume that if you're bothering to use this Bear card then you would surely also take Mitosis with you which means that the likelihood of getting out more than 2 bears before the game is over is much greater than you say.
So I've addressed problem 1 - more HP, less rush power, the card still works more than fine.
And 2 - That's the point.  You have a single Bear producing more Bears using Mitosis, throw in a few Bonds as well, and suddenly the risk of killing off that Bear to stop more from appearing is terrifying.

And for that last part - that's why you also use the card to your own strategy rather than hoping the opponent kills it being your only win condition.

So how DOES life survive in the real world.

Life creatures don't protect each other.  If a creature lights on fire, that's it, bye.  If wolves attack a tribe of buffalo, the buffalo all run together, and the slow sick buffalo gets eaten.  Yes, a mother will attack you if you threaten it's cubs, but I listed earlier why this method wouldn't be smart.  Life /does/ survive because it generates more creatures that can be killed.

Yes, but there are also creatures that exist in the real world that demonstrate different behavior.  For example, bees.  Several species of bees are extremely defensive of their fellow workers and will pursue attackers until the threat has either left their territory or has more or less been removed entirely.
Again, the fact these creatures are in a sense not real means that deciding what behavior they exhibit will be inconclusive unless it is clearly established by zanz.

And you say, "that's what mitosis is".  I won't take credit for designing mitosis.  I did come up with bunnies, which ran off of a similar mechanic.  The card was underpowered and it's probably a good idea it wasn't added, but there's a reason I made mitosis a creature's ability and not a spell.  If you put mitosis on a creature, and every time you activated the ability you got another creature with mitosis, there would be durability and creature protection.  More creatures than can be controlled.  Right now, playing mitosis on a creature is basically condemning it.

The exact same can be said of Adrenaline as well, which is another reason why some form of creature protection would be well deserved.  With all the methods used to condemn Life's creatures to death by CC, you'd think there'd be at least some way to prevent that...right?